The Advent of Joy

Isaiah 7:10-16; Titus 3:4-7
December 19, 2010
The text from Titus is both a theological mouthful, and a simple invitation: “the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, and saved us, according to God’s own mercy, through the Spirit poured out for us through Jesus the Christ.”
In other words: joy to the world, the Lord has come; let earth receive her king.
Joy to the world!
Joy to the world!
The world could certainly use a little joy these days – a little authentic joy.
Too often, instead, we paper over joylessness, and worse, with bits and pieces of cheap happiness.
We can easily shop ourselves into a stupor this time of year and call it the pursuit of happiness, but deep, lasting, authentic joy does not come in a package no matter how big and beautiful it may be.
It’s important to recognize that simple and oft-stated truth, because the truth is some people feel out of place, out of season, this time of year because gifts don’t make them happy, much less truly joyful. Some folks even feel guilty because they don’t feel happy, but there are all kinds of good reasons for not feeling happy this time of year.
Some of us get sick this time of year, and boy do I feel your pain this year. Others, in our part of the world, have moods the mirror the darkness of December days.
But even if you’re hale and hearty and don’t mind winter, Christmas can come as a painful reminder of past loss, of broken relationships, of hope disappointed, of loved ones no longer with us. Blue Christmas is not just an old pop song.
On the other hand, lots of us find all kinds of simple sources of happiness this time of year. Some folks just love the carols of the season. Others love the decorations. Most everyone enjoys the bright eyes of expectant children. Some people even love to shop, and there are even those who love winter weather and long winter nights.
But whether Christmas is a time of the blues for you, or a season of festive cheer, there is deeper good news that should be of great joy for all of us. After all, unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.
That the government will be upon his shoulders is a promise of a future unlike the past or present, and should bring great joy to all … except maybe those who hold too tightly to the power they have.
The he should be called “wonderful,” “counselor” should bring great joy to all of us who suffer, who despair sometimes, whose hearts ache from time to time – that is to say, all of us. That comes as less than good news only to those who sell cheap forms of grace.
That he should be named “mighty God” should come as deep joy to all of those who have suffered what I like to call theological abuse at the hands of those who engage in theological malpractice and try to convince their followers and the rest of us as well that God only loves folks just like them or that God only blesses folks just like them or that there is only one way – always their way – to find the heart of God. Because the Jesus of the gospels does not point us to a God of confined love or restricted blessing or less than awesome mystery, and that is joyous good news indeed, unless you’re peddling a lesser god.
That he shall called “prince of peace” – well that should come as joy to the entire war-weary world.
These tidings of great joy which shall be for all people come with no strings attached.
They also come with an invitation, and one that complicates matters a bit for some. You see, this good news comes with, or, better, comes as an invitation into a relationship. Even better, or more accurately, the good news – the gospel of Jesus Christ – comes as an invitation into a web of relationships.
The gospel invites us into relationship with the God made known through the Jesus story, and into relationship with God’s people in the community of faith that is the church.
There was an article circling around the Facebook world last week, entitled “7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable.” While I’m certain that we could add to the list and complicate is in lots of ways, the seven reasons the author named struck me as legitimate commentary on our times, and they all came down to the same core concern: a profound lack of authentic relationships shaped, formed and sustained in authentic community has left us adrift, unanchored, and fearful in the midst of the constant whitewater of our high-tech, rapidly changing culture.
The great joy that shall be for all people can only be truly experienced and participated in when we are bound together in the kinds of relationships that anchor us firmly.
When we speak, during this Advent season, of preparing our hearts for the coming again of Christ into the world, we are talking about opening our hearts to deep relationships with one another and with the God made known to us through the one whose birth announced the great turning of the world.
So let us turn. Let us turn from paralysis to faithful action in the world. Let us turn from despair toward Advent hope, from fear toward the Advent of love, from strife and division toward the Advent of peace, and from the surface prompts of the marketplace with its false claims of happiness toward the depth of authentic relationship that announces Advent joy. Let us turn, then, toward Bethlehem. Let us turn toward the manger. Amen.

The Advent of Love

Psalm 146; Isaiah 35:1-10
December 12, 2010
To begin with this morning, what are some of the signs of hope that you have witnessed of late?
For me, hope is grounded always in community, and, to borrow from Emily Dickinson, it is given wings by the power of love. Without wings – that is to say, without agency, without the ability to move something, to transform, to change – without that hope will always be disappointed, and thus it will lead to despair.
Last week I quoted Archbishop Romero – “I try not to depend on hope, because unfulfilled hope leads to despair, and we have no need of despairing people. I try, instead, to depend on faith.”
I’d like to suggest this morning that love is the power that moves us from hopes and dreams to faithful action in the world.
This is not easy, to be sure.
As Chris Hedges noted in an essay a couple of weeks ago urging people to speak out for an end to the wars, “Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. Hope does not come with the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is an action. Hope is doing something.”
I think that is mostly right, but only when the power of love moves us from vague and idle hopes into faithful engagement with the suffering and brokenness of the world around us.
It’s crucial to remember that the New Testament concept of love is grounded in Jesus giving of himself for the sake of the world. “Greater love has no one than that he be willing to give up his life for his friends,” Jesus told his followers.
It’s all too easy to sentimentalize love, but the gospels refuse to do so – even down to the Greek word the gospel writers chose: agape. Koine Greek offers three words for love: eros, or romantic, erotic love; philia, or the love of kin, brotherly love as it were; and agape. What distinguishes agape from the others is that it refers to love that expects nothing in return. Romantic love desires its own return in the relationship among lovers. Brotherly love is given out of the obligation of kinship, and one is bound to repay it. But agape is utterly self-giving, without regard for its own well-being or expectation of being returned.
There is incredible power in such love, and when we open our hearts to that love in the person of Jesus we find ourselves moved from passive hope to faithful acting in the world. Advent is about just such opening.
That is to say, I can stand up here and hope that people don’t go hungry on Christmas Eve, or I can open my heart to the love of Christ and move my butt into the street on Christmas Eve to feed people. I can hope that people in this community who are shut in by illness or infirmity know that we care about them, or I can open my heart to the love of Christ and pick up the phone and call them or move my butt and visit them. I can hope that wars will cease, or I can open my heart to the love of Christ and act in the world for nonviolence. I can hope that justice will be done for my GLBT sisters and brothers, or I can open my heart to the love of Christ and move my butt to work for that justice in the church and in society. I can hope that all people know that they are created good in the image of a loving God and hope that they learn to live out of that fundamental identity, or I can open my heart to the love of Christ and then go out into the world to show everyone I meet along the way that they are beloved.
The advent of love is about moving from fear to hope and from hope to faithful action in the world.
In the beautiful carol, O Little Town of Bethlehem, we sing about the hopes and fears of all the years being met on the Holy Night. I believe that’s what the Advent of Love is all about: meeting the hopes and fears of all our years with the love of God known to us in Jesus.
This season of Advent is about preparing a way for that to happen again, about preparing our hearts for the love of Christ.
So this morning, I invite you now to come forward with the strip of cloth you were given, and the notes of hope you’ve attached, and lay them in the cradle as a sign and symbol of preparing the way of the Lord.

The Advent of Hope

December 5, 2010
Romans 15:4-13; Isaiah 11:1-9
The word “hope” appears just a few more than 150 times in scripture. Perhaps not surprisingly, about twenty percent of those instances come in the psalms. Truly, these are songs of hope sung by people of faith.
Perhaps surprisingly, the book of the Bible with the next most instances of the word “hope” is the story of Job. To be sure, almost all of the references to hope in Job are negative, as this:
“For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. 8Though its root grows old in the earth, and its stump dies in the ground, 9yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant. 10But mortals die, and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they? 11As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, 12so mortals lie down and do not rise again; until the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused out of their sleep.”
Nontheless, it is fair to say that Job is filled with hope, even if it is only a hope for hope itself. In many respects, Job is the most humanist part of scripture. Job is everyman or woman – laid low by happenstance utterly beyond his control. Yet still longing after the God of hope.
Earlier this fall I heard Rick Ufford-Chase, past moderator of our General Assembly and current director of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, say that he does not have any time left for hope. Rick was speaking as the director of the peace fellowship during a time of endless war, and as past moderator of a denomination that is clearly dying.
But you do not need to go to such high places to find such feelings.
Rick told us the story of his friend, Romona, a woman he knew twenty years ago living in an extremely poor community in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. One of the seminarians Rick was leading on a delegation asked Romona where she found hope in her life, and her response was something along the lines of the following: "Hope is a luxury I can't afford. I get out of bed in the morning and I do what has to be done. Hope is for people who have access to resources."
I can imagine Job uttering just such words. And I can also imagine that if, for example, on Christmas Eve we asked the men and women in the food line when we hand out meals for A-SPAN what gives them hope, we’d probably get back some quizzical looks. Hot soup and a safe place to sleep are probably foremost on their minds.
In such a context, hope is a luxury. Indeed, in the face of such desperation, hope might just be the last thing you need.
Rick also quoted the late archbishop Oscar Romero to us: Romero said, try not to depend on hope, because unfulfilled hope leads to despair, and we have no need of a despairing people. Try instead to be faithful, to do what needs to be done.
I am not generally given to despair, though I carry around a satchel full of unfulfilled hopes, and as I listened to Rick speak that evening, the words of the late Harvey Milk kept running through my mind. “I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it life is not worth living. You have got to give them hope.”
So, during this Advent season, as we gather around this ancient story that tells us that Christ is coming again, what does Advent hope mean for us? When Paul wrote to the Romans almost 2,000 years ago he firmly believed that the words of Isaiah – a root shall spring forth from the stump of Jesse – foretold the imminent return of Jesus. Whatever our Christology these days, we have to confess that what Paul believed, what he thought and what he preached and wrote about Jesus coming back to earth certainly did not happen. Does Paul’s unfulfilled hope necessitate our despair?
Not at all. The truth is, we share Paul’s hope even now, though we understand it through the long lens of history. Nevertheless, the hope we share would be familiar to him: that Christ is, indeed, coming again into our lives, and that our lives might reflect that hope.
Paul, in his beautiful words from the Corinthian correspondence, speaks of hope in conjunction with two other foundational virtues: faith and love.
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three …”
The key to understanding the hope of Advent, and, indeed, the advent of hope, lies in that trinity of virtues – faith, hope and love.
Interestingly enough, I think Harvey Milk was pointing in the same direction when he famously said, “you’ve gotta give ‘em hope.” He said those words in a speech delivered just before he was assassinated in 1978, and if Harvey had been a good southern boy he would have known to use the plural “you,” and he would’ve said, “y’all have gotta give ‘em hope.” What he said, instead, was this: “you and you and you – gotta give ‘em hope.”
In other words, hope is not and cannot be an individual possession, because authentic hope only arises in community. Authentic hope is only possible in community.
That’s why Paul insists on the power of love – that is to say, the binding force that holds community together is love, and only where there is love can there be hope.
Faith, which is never first about belief but is, instead, foremost about relationship, faith binds us to a particular community and gives specific content to our hope.
Let me flesh that out just a little bit in terms of this season and this community.
First, though, let me say that I agree with Rick not only about certain prospects for the near term, but also about the necessity for faithfulness in the present moment. I think he’s absolutely right about the coming demise of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). We are living into a post-denominational age, and are already well beyond the age of the mainline Protestant establishment in America. I cannot tell you what comes next, but the church I grew up in no longer exists, and we are simply in denial if we think it’s ever coming back again.
There are profoundly serious cultural, personal, ethical, theological, and political issues at stake in the dissolution of the Protestant consensus in America, and if we cling to some false hopes about a return to the good old days then we are doomed to precisely the kind of despair that Romero had in mind when he said that we do not need people dragging around the despair of unfulfilled hopes.
For those hopes are really nothing more than sentimental nostalgia, the longing after an imagined past that never truly was. Moreover, those hopes can easily be reduced to private possessions. I can curl up in front of the fireplace or the Christmas tree with a Hallmark version of the season, and lose myself in the private revelry of my own imagination. And there’s nothing wrong with that in small doses. But there is no real life there, and thus, there is no real hope there either.
Real hope, real Advent hope, is about new life being born in the most unexpected places: unemployment lines, soup kitchens, the day laborer sites, along the borders, far from the seats of power, but also at kitchen tables and back yards where smaller scale family and neighborhood crises get played out every day against the background of a culture of despair that isolates us from one another at every turn.
Why should this be so? Why should God show up in such places? The God revealed at the manger is the God whose very name is, “I will be who I will be,” and whose steadfast promise is “I will be with you always, in just the way that I choose to be.” Emmanuel. God with us. As God chooses. And as the witness of scripture and especially the story of Jesus make abundantly clear, God chooses first to be with the least of these.
We’re going to talk more about this next week – in particular, about the relationship of hope and love, but for this morning, let me close with a story of Advent hope.
Rick and I have traded some e-mail correspondence on hope over these past days, and he framed his questions about hope in part like this:
“I think my point is that although I dream and feel hopeful all the time, and that motivates me a great deal, I also recognize the luxury of feeling hopeful. As I've been reading through the Psalms over the past two years in morning prayer, I find that I have to push myself to read the Psalms of lament. It makes me wonder what would happen if I lost everything I consider security in my life. What if Kitty had a terminal illness, or we lost our jobs, or one of our children was dealing with a significant disability? Then, I think, I would need to begin to depend more on faithfulness than on hope.”
Those are hugely trying, difficult, even tragic circumstances, but they are also typically human. They are Job like. I look around at our community. Some in this circle have lost spouses to terminal illness. Some in this circle have lost jobs. Some have dealt with loved ones with significant disabilities.
Jean Paul Sarte famously remarked, “Hell is other people.” I would content that hope is other people, other people who respond to desperation in others out of the deep wells of hopefulness that they find in the steadfast presence and promise of the God of Advent.
I know that in the most trying times of my own life – job loss, serious illness in my family, times when I have felt helpless and hopeless, times when I felt that Job might not have much on me – I have been upheld by the compassionate acts of other people to whom I have been bound in the fellowship of the communion of the church, and in their compassion I have found renewed hope.
Last spring I travelled down to Tennessee to help my parents, who are both facing serious constraints on their mobility. My mother loves to work in the garden. It is a place of soul restoration for her, a thus a place of hope. The house that we helped them move into a year ago has a lovely back yard but no easy way to get into it after the ramp we had built for access to the house blocked the steps into the yard.
I went down determined to build some steps, but not sure how I was going to accomplish the task by myself in the time I had. But when I got to Chattanooga, it turned out a retired gentleman from my mother’s church had heard about what I was up to and so he showed up with tools and a truck and we got the job done. Nothing miraculous, nothing like what Job faced, and not even among the most trying times of my life, but still a simple gift of hope embodied by a member of the community who didn’t know me from Adam, but who stepped into a small crisis and offered his own gifts.
Authentic hope – whether it is in the face of huge and systemic concerns or small and personal ones – authentic hope is only possible within communities grounded in the deeper hope of the God of the Exodus and the God of Advent.
May this be a season of authentic hope for each of us who share the bonds of this community. Amen.

Wake Up!

Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44
November 28, 2010
Have you ever had the feeling that something was about to happen but you weren’t sure what it was? Weren’t even sure if it was going to be a good thing or a bad thing? Just the feeling that something was coming? Kind of like the feeling of electricity in the air when a summer storm is brewing, the air seems to come alive even as it falls strangely still. Something is in the air. Something is coming, but you don’t know what it is.
Paul’s entire correspondence – at least the letters that scholars agree Paul actually wrote – contain this feeling of anticipation, especially in passages like this one in the letter to the Romans. “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.”
Salvation is nearer to us now. Something is coming, but you don’t know what it is or where to look for it. Now is the time to wake up!
Having spent more than my fair share of time napping over the past week trying to beat back a cold, it’s particularly ironic to preach a sermon called, “Wake Up!”
Moreover, I’m better, I confess, at pointing out the places to avoid than the ones to seek out as you look for whatever this salvation is that is coming. You’re not going to find this salvation at the Best Buy. I promise you. It may be what you’re aiming for, but it’s not at the Target, even though you can get some bumper-sticker theology like this one I saw last week: lots of people who plan to turn to God at the 11th hour die at 10:30. That is a theology, though not one that offers much in the way of salvation – that is to say, much in the way of healing, wholeness, shalom right here, right now, near to us, where we desperately need it.
It’s not available on-line, either, not even at Christmas.com. There really is such a site. You can find everything there from pre-lit Christmas trees to Christmas traditions. I clicked on the latter and went to Christmas.shopzilla.com. True story. I searched for “Jesus” on the site and got “low prices on Jesus at Amazon.com.”
Somehow I just don’t think this is what Paul had in mind when he noted the closeness of salvation. I don’t think this is what Jesus meant when he said “the kingdom of God is near.” And if the author of Matthew could possibly have imagined our context I think he would have despaired over the possibility of anyone keeping awake through all of this.
And waking up is precisely what is so desperately needed at this historic moment. There’s a global economic crisis going on. We’re fighting two wars, and have been for the better part of a decade. We can argue about cause and effect till we’ve run out of breath for the argument, but the global climate is changing and our grandchildren, for better or for worse, will never see Disney World because it’s going to sink under the rising ocean water while we sleep. Meanwhile, we have allowed coal companies to rape mountains for a generation, scraping the tops off a thousand Appalachian peaks eons in the making. But it’s not in our backyard, so we can just roll over and go back to sleep.
Waking up is precisely what we so desperately need, but instead, we have political leaders, opinion shapers, talking heads, entertainers and all of the rest of us: sleepwalking through our own brief moment, our one small chance to make a difference – our time in history. So we get liberals triangulating themselves into thin air and blowing their chance to ban employment discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender workers because it might risk an election outcome that was inevitable anyway. We get conservatives so bent on denying the president any political victory that they’re willing to block arms control treaties begun by their sainted President Reagan. We get talking heads slamming an American-made car because it doesn’t fit their political narrative, even when it wins Motor Trend Magazine’s car of the year award. And we get the equal opportunity ignorance of on-line comments from what passes for an engaged citizenry: Pallin is an idiot; Obama is a socialist; and we’ll all get to Hitler within six comments or less no matter what the topic.
Meanwhile the Korean peninsula is on the verge of war, but all the TV news cares to show us is dressmaking for a royal wedding. Almost 15 percent of American households are “food insecure” – a wonderfully Orwellian phrase if ever there was one. It means this: 17.4 million American families face hunger as a regular part of life. And back on the news, everyone is all abuzz over Bristol Pallin dancing with the stars, at least, that is, until everyone gets all atwitter over the security theater of the TSA, happily ignoring the tens of millions of Americans who are out of work and can’t afford an airline ticket anway.
What passes for news is about the same as what passes for education, and most all of it is nothing more than infotainment designed to make good consumers of us all, and so it is no accident that every commercial is a 30-second salvation story. The closest we come to pondering infinity is in a car lot. Inspire is a perfume. Truth is a clothing line.
Meanwhile we’re all tinkering with our latest gadgets, and trying desperately to sleep through such things as reports that wi-fi signals are damaging trees; that talking on cell phones – with or without our hands – while we drive is as dangerous as driving while drunk; or that if we could put one year’s worth of thrown-away electronic gadgets into train cars the train would circle the globe. And still, I lust after the i-Phone and a new laptop.
When Karl Barth remarked that one should preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other I don’t think he had the Black Friday ad pages in mind.
And don’t even get me started on what we do in the church, on how we domesticate Jesus and reduce his radical call to love to Hallmark card sentimentalism, how we decent-and-in-order ourselves right out of inspiration, and narrow our field of vision and of mission to avoid offence to others and inconvenience to ourselves. Meanwhile the rich get richer and the poor get “we’re praying for you,” and the gap between the two grows to a gapping scar on the commonweal.
Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ. Jesus, the Christ.
Oh, yeah. That guy.
The one whose coming threatened an empire. The one whose coming again – here and now – could turn upside down the empire of anesthesia in which we all doze, and, if we let it, the empire of real violence that props up all of the rest of this litany I’ve named this morning.
To be wide awake to the coming of Christ in the midst of the empire is the greatest act of resistance to the violence of empire.
When Jesus, at the far end of his life, stood before the Roman prelate, Pontius Pilate, he said to him, “Your Roman Empire, Pilate, is based on the injustice of violence, but my divine kingdom is based on the justice of non-violence.”
Jesus would say the same thing to us, today. The empire – our empire – is based on the injustice of violence, but the kingdom of God, the commonwealth of the beloved, is based on the justice of nonviolence. If you want to be there for the coming again of Christ in the world, then go to those places where the spirit of the living God is most palpably at work: the barrios, the soup lines, the Ninth Ward, the day laborer lines, hospitals and hospices, A-SPAN, AFAC, the places of creative nonviolence and resistance. Those are the places of Advent.
This is not some “God damn America” sermon, but it is also not some “God bless America” sermon either. It is an Advent sermon, and therefore it is a “God, wake up America” sermon. Wake us up. For to sleep at such a time as this is to bless the injustice of the status quo. Wake us up now, before the hour grows too late. Grant us the clear vision to discern the reality of the present moment, before it slips away. Grant us the strength to carry on in wakefulness though the culture would lull us to sleep. Grant us the courage to change the things that should be changed, now, before it grows too late.
Besides all this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for us to wake from sleep. The night is far gone, the day is near, and salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. Something is in the air, for Christ is coming close. Wake us up to your presence, O Lord of all. Amen.